Starfish

Three

"That's incredible." Nina waited until Meem stripped off her gloves before doing the same. "We're having a similar issue on Earth. There's this species of cone snail that produces a venom that's so deadly it'll kill a human in minutes, but contains a peptide that's a thousand times stronger than morphine. Before the climate crisis, we were experimenting with using other compounds to treat neurological diseases. Now we're just trying to get wild populations stable so we can start breeding them for research purposes again."

Meem gave Nina a strange look - was it confusion, curiosity, or something else? Dreen faces were hard to read sometimes. Meem's bioluminescent dots glowed a neutral white, barely noticeable under the bright laboratory lights. That, and her tough leathery skin was smooth and shiny where it was thinner over her collar-bones. She's so pretty, wish I sparkled like that. Even if they were strange, the Dreen were beautiful to look at.

Meem showed Nina more of the specimens. "This is a green flasher," she pointed to another tank with a purple ultraviolet lamp built into the cover. Inside, a pancake-shaped creature like a ray but with several finger-like projections around its flat edge clambered around the rocks on the bottom of the tank, its belly flashing a startling green. "They share the same glowing pores as Dreen, but their light output is several times brighter than ours. Replicating that would create safety lighting that puts off no heat and requires almost zero input or maintenance. Additionally if we come to understand just how they put off such bright light, we might be able to restore the pores of Dreen who-" Meem abruptly ended her sentence, her cheeks and throat sparkling pink. "I... That project isn't my department's concern, actually. Forget I mentioned it, if you would." She waved Nina away from the green flasher's tank. "Over here are some young bluebacks, which you might be interested in."

In a tall cage in the center of the room, almost as large as the bedroom in Nina's apartment, several animals that looked like sloths except for their vivid blue pelts clambered on ropes and branches. Rather than the thick Dreen skin that looked like burnished leather, the bluebacks were covered in a fine fur the exact shade of the crystal-blue sky, with a brilliant stripe running down their spines. Their bellies were much paler, an insipid robin's egg, and their faces resembled the small wild cats that roamed much of Earth's older cities.

"They're cute!" Nina said, leaning close to the cage but not so close that one could reach out and scratch her. They had wicked-looking claws at the ends of their hairless feet. "What are you doing with them?"

"Would you like to hold one? These have been hand-raised, they're not dangerous." Meem unlocked the cage and some of the creatures climbed down out of the artificial tree set into the cage floor and approached her, making soft cooing noises. Meem held out an arm and, like a sloth, one of the bluebacks reached up and hooked a paw over her wrist and clung to her arm like a monkey. "Several generations ago these were almost extinct, hunted for their fur. After we successfully ended the fur trade and started breeding and reintroducing them to the wild, we're studying the chemical structure of their pelts so we can re-create the softness and colorfastness without having to kill them."

Meem held her arm out for Nina to pet the blueback. The animal turned its feline head towards her and made a soft snuffling sound as it sniffed Nina's hand before letting off a high-pitched trill and rubbing its cheek against her palm. She ran her fingers over it's head and found that the fur was indeed incredibly soft. "People would pay a lot of money to keep these as pets," she commented.

"Some Dreen do," Meem explained as she put the creature back into the cage with its fellows, "though I don't think it's appropriate. We've already exploited them once." Meem washed her hands and instructed Nina to do so as well. "Of course you understand that sanitation is of the utmost importance in the lab, we handle several highly toxic or venomous creatures here. That one especially," Meem nodded at a tank behind Nina that had red reflective tape or paint applied to every non-glass surface. Extreme Caution, advised a yellow placard attached to the front of the tank, Paralysis Risk.